Over at Media Post's Online Media Daily, Angela Steele of Starcom USA opines on the future of Mobile Marketing. She identifies a number of challenges that lay ahead, but she sees light at the end of the tunnel. We've culled some highlights from her piece below:

Although mobile devices have penetrated nearly 80% of U.S. households and SMS has penetrated over one-third of all users, data services drastically lag behind. Only a fraction of consumers report using data services and the mobile Internet. It seems that in the rush to advance the mobile market, the consumer is the holdup.

If we truly want to maximize the marketing potential of mobile channels, we all need to rally around the consumer and encourage their mobile behaviors. Here's how.

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The challenge is that mobile marketing cannot be successful as an added-on silo, but should be an integral component at the heart of the marketing plan. In the earliest stages of the planning process, smart marketers must ask, "What are the objectives of the campaign and how will mobile deliver on those objectives?" then decide early on which mobile strategies will enhance the broader campaign idea."

She identifies a number of key points to keep in mind:

We as marketers must offer value to be welcomed in consumers' beloved, personal devices -- or in any medium for that matter. Whether we're informing, entertaining, or enhancing existing mobile experiences, brand interactions need to offer something of relevance and value.

As marketers, we must befriend the carriers and cooperatively develop solutions to add non-intrusive, welcome value for the consumer.

 

What ultimately matters most is the ability to impact consumers and then prove that impact. Clients pay their agencies and wireless companies to impact consumers. Marketers have fixed budgets and therefore need to make choices among media channels.

Expected return is the driver of those choices, and without standardized, third-party metrics, mobile return is difficult to quantify and compare to widely accepted media options such as TV, print and online. In order to vie for fair share of the marketing pie, mobile needs to offer accountability standards comparable to other contact points in marketers' arsenals. The future success of the mobile channel depends upon standardized accountability.

 

Services like Club Texting's Opt-In SMS services for nightclubs, promoters, retail, and magazines addresses these challenges--customers choose to receive messages, which are comprised of content that they desire to know about, and they do so by simply messaging a phrase to a 5 character SMS short code, which overcomes the consumer accessibility/reluctance obstacle.